It's a curious thing, but there's been a couple of LLD fics that have left me feeling very homesick and nostalgic for my own life. I'm not Chinese or Chinese-adjacent on any dimension you can conjure, and it's rather the multigenerational families, living together and sharing such close quarters that they describe that remind me so much of my own childhood that I get almost teary-eyed, even though there's clear points of difference.
After we left ---, me and my brother would be on a plane back home as soon as my school year ended. The country we moved to was unsafe, insecure, we couldn't go outside on the street to play or make friends in the neighborhood, so our parents would send us to spend all of summer with my grandparents in their tiny public housing walk up, me and my brother and my three aunts and my uncles and my cousin, all of us crammed into the same tiny apartment, the bedrooms with the fold-away bunk beds that my aunts would pull down every night, the single bathroom for nine people. One of my aunts collected pencils; I would make roads on the bedroom floor that had to be put away in the evening so we could sleep. I have no idea how we all fit there, looking back, but we did. It didn't even feel cramped.
I'm the second oldest of my generation, seven years older than my brother, who's the third, and seven years younger than my cousin, who's the first; he's seven years younger again than my youngest uncle. Before we moved overseas every Saturday was spent at my grandparents' place, the family gathered almost ritually, the table extended and pushed up against the sofa where I was too short to sit. The sofa was the domain of my uncles and my cousin, who'd get a cushion each to bring them up to height, the far end of the table was grandad and grandma, the one closest to the kitchen (where two people could fit) my three aunts, whose responsibility everything was (except for making coffee after the meal was over, which fell to my cousin as soon as he was old enough), and on the other side of the table, the long side with the four or five chairs was my parents, me, generally at the far end as the sole left-hander. For Christmas we would cram up to 15, 16 people around that table.
Summer back home is hot and dry and slow and long, and there was no air conditioning, just fans and shade, and at night, just hoping for relief; grandma sleeping on the pull-out sofa because it was cooler there if she kept the kitchen and the living room window open, and me crawling there sometimes if there was no breeze in the bedroom I shared with my aunts. I remember going down to the municipal pool in the morning, before it was crowded, and then coming back home in time to watch grandma make lunch, or going to the wet market with my grand dad or, some days when she didn't have work and was in charge of cooking, with my aunt. After lunch there was the stillness of high summer heat, the Tour de France on tv or some telenovela, and then when it was a bit cooler playing cards with my grandmother and winning a coin from her, enough to run down four floors to the street and buy exactly five pieces of pick and mix candy from the pop up icecream stand. After that, at 6, at 7pm, going outside again for a walk or a drink with my grandparents and their church friends, sitting on hot and sticky plastic chairs outside in the shade of some random building. The woman who also ran one of the market stalls, and her husband, who had a granddaughter a couple of years younger than me, and who would sometimes come too.
I remember making custard with my grandmother in the kitchen, whipping up egg whites to stiff peaks and then dolloping them onto floating marie biscuits, a dusting of cinammon, or watching my grandfather make ---, the one thing he would make, or clip his canary's claws, or fill a little enamel soap dish with water so the bird could have a bath of its own.
I go home twice a year, generally; detour on a work trip and then show up sometime in December or January for the holidays. I was so so lucky to be able to go home in March 2020, right before the pandemic began, so that my time apart was as short as it could've possibly been; I'll write about my memories of that final day there some other day, the sense of mounting surrealism and urgency and strangeness, and the months that followed back here, under lockdown. The day I arrived we had a family gathering at my parents' place, 18 people, the last time my family were together in the same place until late 2021. In the intervening time my grandfather had a stroke and recovered miraculously, my grandmother's long term memory is absolutely gone. When I went home for Christmas this year some things were hard, after so much time away but what I'm haunted by is my granddad holding me close and saying to me, I thought I was going to die and never see you again.
My other grandparents, the ones who lived in a different city hours away, I've never been as close to them, for many reasons. That grandfather has dementia, and when I went to see him at the nursing home this year he didn't recognise me, didn't even see me. He looked at the space where I was and his eyes did not focus or realise there was a person in front of him. I called him for his birthday, three months later, and my mom held the phone up and then he knew who I was and where, and said thank you for the birthday wishes, and we exchanged four or five sentences and he was the most coherent he's been for years on the phone to me, and I hated the distance so much.
(Fics are
fortune immense as the sky and chapter 7 of
Have You Eaten?, which had such a strong and tender and loving sense of place)
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